


Look Upon Verdure

by ainsley



Category: The 4400
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ainsley/pseuds/ainsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diana may not be a superhero, but she has an origin story nonetheless. This is it.</p><p>Set vaguely S2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look Upon Verdure

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http:)amilyn in the Yuletide 2007 exchange.
> 
> Thank you, [](http:)idella, for being brilliant and a phenomenal beta.

_One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade._  
\--Chinese proverb

_To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment._  
\--Jane Austen

* * *

Say what you wanted about bacteria, but they acted in an orderly, logical, and therefore predictable manner. Working with and studying brainless entities provided a refreshing relief and refuge from dealing with humans, who too often pretended brainlessness in messy, unpredictable, usually painful ways.

Bacteria wanted to live. They did what they needed to do to ensure their survival, eating when they needed to eat, propagating when then needed to propagate, and defending themselves when the immediate circumstance required them to defend themselves.

Science was Diana's refuge, her hideout from the ordinary and trite messiness of dealing with people. It wasn't that she didn't like people - because she did - but some days she wasn't certain whether she should root for man or disease.

The orderliness and precision required in the sciences appealed to her on an instinctual level; by the time she was in college she started appreciating simpler species for their lack of complexity. There was a beauty to their patterns, an art in the merging of form and function. She spent increasing amounts of time in the lab, because sometimes people were just too messy. The happy family of her childhood had slowly descended into chaos and confusion, the dorm was filled with people acting like puppies in heat, and her boyfriend, well, his brand of messy didn't warrant the energy it would take to unravel. So Diana tossed him like tangled Christmas tree lights, moved into a tiny studio, and went home less and less often.

::

When bacterial logic happened to people, the festering mess of humanity took on entirely new levels of chaos, but it was a chaos with an underlying logic. When diseases spread, when epidemics happened, people started acting logically. Their existential dilemmas suddenly reduced to real questions of survival, humanity took on the best characteristics of the bacteria world. Diana liked people, especially when she didn't have to deal with them, so epidemiology and Diana fit together like adenine and thymine, like cytosine and guanine.

Graduate school was stressful, certainly, but Diana loved it. By day she studied what she wanted, immersed herself in microbiology, and at night she went home to Josh. Physics, like bacteria, had logic and order, and Diana and Josh together had chemistry.

One of their many compatibilities was their lack of desire for children. Kids were the messiest of people; all those emotions untempered by logic and restraint promised upheaval and distraction from the life they enjoyed, a balanced life of work and play. That didn't even include their physical messiness, the toys everywhere, the diaper changing and toilet training. Plus, why introduce someone else onto an already overcrowded planet? Diana was content to leave that to other people, the ones who truly wanted to be parents.

Then, of course, Josh decided to act like a child himself, engaging in senseless infidelity rather than call off their engagement.

So Diana went to work for the CDC, lived quietly alone, and was content with her lot in life.

::

When science threw out the rulebook, anything could happen. As Diana knew of no science that allowed for people to be snatched out of time, only to be returned in a large hovering ball of light, well. Clearly there was more to the heavens and earth than had been accounted for in her philosophy.

And how do you turn down an eight-year-old (one who had been born sixty-six years ago) when she asks to go home with you?

For all that Maia Rutledge had only lived eight years, she had the perspicacity Diana would have expected from a 66-year-old. Some days she was not sure how old Maia was, sixty-six, eight, or something in between. Maia's life had not proceeded chronologically; why should her maturity level have done so?

Half the time Diana felt as though Maia were the parent in their relationship. Certainly Maia was nothing like the children she'd envisioned when contemplating parenthood. Diana wished she could thank Maia's parents for doing the heavy lifting, for dealing with the hassles of infancy and the toddler years.

She'd cross the bridge of raising a teenager when she got there, assuming the future opted not to make a habit of abducting Maia.

Maybe it was Maia's pre-cognition that was responsible for her maturity; maybe her gravity came from having lost her place in time. But Maia wasn't a child like the children Diana knew as a child, and maybe she should follow science's lead and toss the rulebook.

::

Raising Maia somehow became the tidy part of her life, now that she investigated super-humans rather than super-bacteria and super-viruses. The paranormal had a lot going for it in terms of being interesting (too often as in the Chinese curse), but not much in the way of precision.

Although Diana had never wanted to be a parent, somehow Maia had fit into her life so seamlessly it was almost as though she had always been there, almost as though she'd been expected. She would not put it past the future to have made that the case, but they'd probably been too busy abducting people to manipulate the lives of those who didn't factor into their plans.

Or did she herself factor into their desired outcome? Was she part of the solution, just as much as the 4400?

Working for NTAC as she did, some days she thought she might be part of the problem. Her doubts about her job were strongest when Maia's nightmares resurfaced. But Maia could see the future and knew she belonged with Diana, had even wanted to make it formal, so Diana trusted, as much as she could, that she was helping the future, the future that had given her the daughter she never knew she wanted, needed.

It was enough. It wasn't everything, not by a long shot; the world confused her now in ways it never had before, but perhaps the chaos was necessary. The dirty socks littering Maia's floor, on the other hand...


End file.
